Datum
04. März 2024
Forth meeting in the 2023–2024 EASA Medical Anthropology Europe Seminar Series, online
Online Lecture: „Machine Learning to Care: Imagining, Encoding, and Experiencing Automated Therapy in India”
By Claudia Lang Tufts (University)
7th of March, at 4:30 pm CET on Zoom
Register here to attend
A growing digital mental health market is characterized by techno-utopian imaginaries to transform or even reinvent care through digitization and artificial intelligence (AI). Proponents celebrate digital therapy as a scalable and cost-effective solution to missing or inadequate infrastructures and globally increasing demand for mental health care, further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics criticize techno-reductionism and worry about dehumanization and surveillance. In this article, I offer a more nuanced and complex picture as a corrective to these polarized debates, by ethnographically examining a digital mental health app’s becoming.
Using the case of Wysa, I aim to understand how designers imagine the app to help people deal with mental challenges, how they encode these assumptions into the app, and how users experience and respond to Wysa. Designers and users imagine the app’s achievements and failures in terms of agency, and these imaginaries are ambiguous. Although designers try to encode empathetic listening into the chatbot, users do not necessarily or always experience it that way, and there are distortions and frustrations in many cases. Designers, however, do not see this as failure but rather as valuable feedback in the process of “failing forward”.
Claudia Lang (Ph.D., PD, Social and Cultural Anthropology) holds a Heisenberg position at the University of Leipzig and is a research associate at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. She is currently a visiting scholar at Tufts University, Boston. Earlier she was an ERC-funded postdoctoral fellow with GLOBHEALTH at the Cermes3 in Paris and held academic positions at the University of Munich, Münster and Leipzig. Her current research focuses on the reconfiguration of mental health and care through digitization in India and beyond, especially AI therapy. Other research areas include global health, depression, Ayurveda, science and technology, and ecological grief in late industrial India. Her regional focus is South Asia. She is the author of Depression in Kerala. Ayurveda and mental health care in the 21st century (Routledge), and a co-author of Global Health for All: Knowledge, Politics, and Practices (Rutgers) as well as of The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia” (Amsterdam University Press).